


tv cables

by ezyl (gamblers)



Category: Bakuman, Johnny's Entertainment, Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Anachronistic, Angst and Humor, Car Accidents, Heiwajima Shizuo - Freeform, M/M, Mutually Unrequited, Orihara Izaya - Freeform, Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-31
Updated: 2010-12-31
Packaged: 2018-11-02 09:35:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10941765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamblers/pseuds/ezyl
Summary: And even so, the world continues to spin!This is the memory of how Marui's first kiss was taken away by Jirou: in a hospital bed at midnight, tangled between white hospital sheets and hospital gowns that haven't been changed in three days, dark curtains and dimmed lights and feeble music on the radio, a week into his collision with the Toyota Prius and with the stitches on his chest coming undone, rain pouring down in buckets outside and sliding down windows and the crotch in his pants chafing against his skin until it all feels surprisingly hot, this is the memory of how he's being kissed on the lips by someone he doesn't really know and that's when he calls for his mother.





	tv cables

**Author's Note:**

> first posted [here](http://pillowcased.livejournal.com/12122.html). this was written in 2010 for Slacky c/o the pointless but original holiday fic exchange.

They are walking on the street when the car hits. It is a quarter past five in the afternoon and there are clouds in the sky. They are all feeling immensely happy and rather proud of themselves, because Marui just made the regulars again after two months of standing around and gnashing his teeth on the sidelines and Akaya just got presented with an opportunity to beat up a freshman for the first time in five hours and Niou finally convinced Yagyuu to take off his pants last night and high school is a total goddamn bundle of joy and cupcakes and matured bodies after puberty, but then there's a car and it's running a red light as if it was being chased by the Whomping Willow and Christ's Second Coming is one step closer to becoming a hit-and-run, a whiff of sulfur in the air and two shakes of salt.

And there are clouds in the sky, so immediately after the driver slips a thumb over his steering wheel and the tires scribble a happy face on the asphalt and a Toyota Prius manages to overcome laws of physics that even tennis had never accomplished before, the headlights plow right into Marui's chest at forty-kilometers-per-hour kinetic-friction-zero-point-zero-two and it starts pouring, there are suddenly raindrops everywhere, in the gutters on the bookshelves under girls' skirts and between their legs seriously _fucking everywhere_ and lightning dances and thunder claps in the sky and after that it's hailing and some guy on the street wearing a jacket with a furry hood swears to god he can see snowflakes, so when the sky finally settles down, the ambulance has pulled away and the sheets in his hospital bed are white, so fucking white.

And yeah, then he's dead.

"Anticlimatic, aren't you?" the angel says. He's wearing three rings on his index finger and a tan fedora on the left side of his head, and he's got a pinky finger shoved two-knuckles deep into his right nostril. He's speaking in clumps of Kansai-ben and his outfit is as gay as Monday, so he must be a masochist, Marui decides. He's not all that polite either, especially not for an angel of Daten City. Not that Marui was expecting angels to be very polite. He hadn't expected to end up in heaven at all, to be honest, and he wouldn't have been surprised if this was actually hell in disguise.

"I'd just gotten my driver's license, too," he chooses to whine about it instead. "Dude, can you even imagine?"

"Pretty fucking ironic, I know right?" Fedora Angel smirks. "I would have killed myself."

"Not funny."

"It is _so_ funny."

"Is not."

"Go fuck yourself."

"...How are you even allowed to say stuff like that?"

"What do you mean?" the angel asks, and he sounds genuinely interested, but there are so many cruel inconsistencies about him that Marui only thinks that this is even more ridiculous.

"You're swearing like crazy, you look like Hard Gay, and either someone extremely perverted dressed you up, or you're just kinky as hell."

"You're right, I am a Kinki," the angel shrugs. "I'm from Osaka, after all. I'm not a Kinki Kid, though. I wouldn't want to be in that band, anyway. Both of them are old."

"Wait, hold up. Aren't you supposed to be an angel? Isn't this supposed to be heaven? Seriously isn't there supposed to be like, I dunno, a lightning bolt bearing heavy religious undertones and organ music that's programmed to come and split your skull in half every time you say 'fuck'?"

"Uh, well," The angel clears his throat. "...You know this isn't actually heaven, right? I'm here on duty. To kill ghosts and stuff. My fedora turns into a sub-machinegun. And you're just here...because you're here."

In another minute, a tall blond angel with a leotard for a celestial weapon takes the fedora angel by the arm and drags him away, muttering something about Ryo-chan always spending too much time chatting up the newcomers and didn't he have enough sex as it is already, did he really have a plan to inherit 666 STDs before the end of spring?

And so Marui understands that he's not actually dead, only that he'd had a weirdass dream, and when he wakes up he's warm and cozy in his hospital bed but then he's yelling for his mother because there is somebody else curled up in his sheets, one arm flung across his pillow and the other across Marui's chest, and they're making small moaning sounds and they've got Slenderman elbows and Marui starts feeling this weird feeling like he's about to either get suffocated to death or abducted by aliens, maybe both.

In reality, it's just Akutagawa Jirou (whose name he still isn't sure why he remembers), member of the Hyoutei Tennis Club and persistent Stalker of the Year. It's just Akutagawa Jirou, giving him a huge, dick-warming hug.

 

~

 

This is the memory of how Marui's first kiss was taken away by Jirou: in a hospital bed at midnight, tangled between white hospital sheets and hospital gowns that haven't been changed in three days, dark curtains and dimmed lights and feeble music on the radio, a week into his collision with the Toyota Prius and with the stitches on his chest coming undone, rain pouring down in buckets outside and sliding down windows and the crotch in his pants chafing against his skin until it all feels surprisingly hot, this is the memory of how he's being kissed on the lips by someone he doesn't really know and that's when he calls for his mother.

And Jirou, at least, has the nerve to yelp and back away.

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry, I thought you were Gakuto," he'll tell Marui later, after that tangly-armed hug and kiss on the lips and girly shriek in surprise. "I thought he was in this ward, he's been sick with a really high fever after he threw my textbooks out in the rain, and in the dark you guys sort of have the same face shape, and your hair is the same color too, a-and--"

"You can't tell apart hair color in the dark," Marui points out, "And you could have just turned the lights on or opened the curtains."

"O-Oh yeah, huh."

"Yeah."

"..."

"..."

"Marui-kun, I am horribly, horribly embarrassed right now."

"It's OK, man," Marui says, "I'm totally cool with it. I just didn't know you liked boys that way, so it came as a little bit of a surprise."

"Really? I thought it was pretty obvious. I did stalk you for three months, didn't I?"

"Oh yeah, I completely forgot about that. Huh."

Jirou blinks. "You did?"

"..."

(He hadn't, not really.)

"..."

"Hey."

"W-What?"

"Stay and talk with me, yeah? Wanna help me find some gum?"

"O-Oh. OK."

And that's how the ideas began.

 

~

 

"So you're back again," the fedora angel named Ryo-chan says, "And I have a vision for you."

"Wait, what?" says Marui.

"I'm going to bring you a vision. It might hurt a little, but it's very important that you see it."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why? Because Hibari Kyouya said so, that's why. Do you think a man of my caliber could last a single day with the Disciplinary Committee?"

 

~

 

Jirou decided to give up on Marui-kun in his last year of junior high, during the last week of the Nationals when he'd seen Marui-kun telling Kirihara Akaya to man the fuck up, and again on Valentine's Day when he'd received chocolates from a few girls in his school. He would have gladly offered them to Marui-kun, he even rode the bus all the way to Rikkaidai to give it to him, but then he realized that he should probably wait until White Day, because isn't that when boys give out chocolates? Only he wasn't sure if he should have, because it might offend Marui-kun, despite his affinity for sweets and Jirou was likely overthinking it, but he wanted it all to be perfect when he could come and make Marui-kun a happier person.

He had started to notice Marui-kun a lot at the beginning of the year before, when he had first played in the regionals and seen and heard the rumors. There were already a bunch of tennis tensai people wandering around by then, and Atobe was one of them and that was enough for Jirou to care even less about it. There wasn't anything special about Marui-kun, as far as being a tennis genius went. He received mediocre grades in school and he had one or two special shots up his sleeve and his tennis ball could hop across the net like a ballerina, but it was only tennis, it was only genius, it was something Jirou had and Fuji Syuusuke had and Echizen Ryoma had as well, so did it really matter? So he didn't know why he'd found so much to see in Marui-kun, but he had seen it anyway and he had liked what he'd seen, and apparently so did his body while he fumbled in the shower stalls.

But if he had realized anything at all, it was that Marui-kun was not a very happy person. He gave off a very glowing sort of air when he played tennis, but off-courts, when Jirou was there to watch him clean up and leave practice, the glow sort of disappears. It's kind of like the sparkle cream that Jirou's sister likes to rub all over her cheeks; it makes her look dang sexy at first but then the little pieces of glitter peel off one by one by one until she looks like she's trying too hard to pretend she's from the Hello!Project. Marui-kun is not a happy person off-courts. He walks home by himself after practice and takes the local bus to his house while there are clouds in the sky. It's a one-story, one-bedroom-one-bathroom that he shares with his sister who goes to Waseda. There's a combini around the corner and street lamps every two blocks. It gets very dark at night, and Marui opens his front door with a key from a chain around his neck. On White Day, the streets are quiet and the restaurants are lit and Marui is there in front of his house, opening the door and Jirou walks up a little closer, if only to see better.

But what he hears is this: "I know you're stalking me, Akutagawa, and I'm not afraid to slice your balls in half if you come any closer."

And somehow, all these dreams come crashing down.

(Marui wakes up again, and when he does, Jirou's looking down at him with a soft expression on his face. Questions? The judge bangs a gravel against two slabs of stone and three thousand reels of thought. Ten thousand years of solitude. Are there any questions?)

 

~

 

At around three pm, two intruders come crashing into the building. One of them is waving a large flashlight, and the other one is toting a bag with a sketchbook. Neither of them are very quiet, and the smell of alcohol pricks Marui's nose. Oh man, it's nearly New Year's but it still feels like summer, one of them says, my hands are freezing the fuck off and yet my heart is so warm! You must be dreaming about Azuki again, psycho, says the other one, get a fuckin' grip you know we're not here to play, and they go back and forth like that for quite a bit until they burst open the door of the ward and walk in on Jirou crouched on Marui's bed, straddling Marui's lap and both of them looking like they've just been kissing each other senseless.

"Are you guys homeless or something?" Jirou asks first.

"Uh, no," the one called Psycho snorts, "We're writing a manga. About hospitals. And it's going to get turned into an anime and a medical drama on NHK starring Kimura Takuya and then I'll be able to marry my fiancee."

"Got that right, bitch," the other says, and then he cracks his knuckles. "Niiiiiiiizuma-kuuuun? Bitch be going dowwwwwn. NIIIIIIIIIZUMA-KUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!?"

"Stop trying to make Heiwajima Shizuo happen, Shujin," Psycho rolls his eyes, "It is not going to happen."

"But he's so fetch!" Shujin pouts, and then they're both rolling on the floor and slapping each other's knees. Both of them are wearing uniforms from North High School, the tacky blue jacket and checkered pants, and either they can't keep quiet or they've had too much to drink, and Marui feels the first signs of careful insanity creeping up over him again.

"I told you," Jirou whispers. "Those kids from North High School are all nutballs. None of them play tennis, either." He says this with a bored bounce on his haunches, and he lands squarely on Marui's thighs a little too hard and Marui groans from the pain. His stitches aren't quite healed yet.

The laughter stops.

"Oh dear, are we interrupting something?" Psycho asks, and even in the dark you can tell he's blushing.

"No, carry on," Marui says snidely, and Jirou hastily removes himself from Marui's lap.

 

~

 

"To be honest, I don't even want to show you the next vision," the tall blond angel says with a small smile. "It broke my heart while I was watching it. I felt _so_ bad for you. It was even sadder than 1 Litre of Tears. Isn't that right, Ryo-chan?"

"Just show him the damn thing, Kei," Ryo-chan growls, ripping his fedora from his head and stomping it down on the ground.

 

~

 

The whole thing with Mukahi started in the summer at training camp. It was extremely unpleasant, at first. They'd started arguing with each other for the first time because Jirou was kind of pissed, seriously fucking pissed off that his manhood had been threatened by Marui-kun and pissed off because Atobe had shitty hair and pissed off because Echizen was apparently the only one in the world who could go to America and still release a photobook and make it sell like _Harry Potter_ and seriously pissed off because life wasn't all that fair. And Mukahi hadn't really known what had gotten him off, either, only that Yuushi had started ignoring him again in favor of Atobe's concert tickets for Sakamoto Ryuuichi revitalizations, and things weren't going very well with Arashiyama Hotori, so they started yelling at each other during lunch and they wouldn't stop yelling, and everyone was too freaked out to see Jirou yelling that no one bothered to try stopping them from yelling. The yelling continued all the way into the afternoon and throughout practice until the sky was dark and finally behind the training shed, where Mukahi was so angry and hoarse and out of breath that Jirou couldn't do anything except kiss him on his stupid angry mouth, and that's how the whole thing with Mukahi started in the summer at training camp.

So they kiss in the empty corners of classrooms and after practice and once in the rain when they'd gotten into a fight and Gakuto dropped all of his textbooks into the Shinkansen tracks. And it's all in secret except everybody in the tennis club knows, but they don't tease them about it and pretend they don't notice and Gakuto's fine with it, so Jirou is too.

"I don't love you," he tells Gakuto on another day, and Gakuto tells him that he understands and he wouldn't expect it from somebody so lame and it's not like he wants Jirou's love, and Jirou better save it for someone better than him and doesn't Jirou like that Rikkai boy anyway, the one with redder hair than Gakuto's and some chewing gum complex?

And then the tears wouldn't stop falling on the carpet, but Gakuto's holding him really tightly, so tightly that his chest hurts, and it must be special for him because he's never tried to hug him before, so Jirou decides that he must be wrong.

(There's something that moves a little in his chest, but Marui isn't really sure what it is; it pricks for two seconds and hurts his nose after but that's probably just the dust in the air.)

 

~

 

"I'm sorry," Marui says suddenly. "Jirou, I'm really sorry."

"What are you sorry about?" Jirou laughs, "I should be sorry, Marui-kun. You're still injured and I should probably go and find Mukahi. He'll be in the other ward at the end. He told me he liked window beds."

"I didn't know you had feelings for me. Like that, I mean. I didn't realize it."

"...Oh," says Jirou, "oh. Well. This is awkward now, isn't it? I didn't come here to hear that, you know. I shouldn't have stayed here. I should really get going. It's close to four, now." He gets up from Marui's bed, but Marui flinches, closes his left hand over Jirou's wrist.

"Ow!" Jirou says, but he stays a little longer and he doesn't try to pry his wrist away. "Please let go."

"You're really gonna go, aren't you?"

"Y-Yeah," says Jirou.

"Akutagawa-kun," he says, swallows a breath. Thinks about what he should say and what he shouldn't and decides that maybe he shouldn't be thinking, at all. "Akutagawa-kun." Clears his throat. "Jirou-san."

"Jirou's fine, you know."

"Jirou-kun, then." Marui says, feels the name weigh a bit on his tongue. "You're really gonna go?"

"I have to go see Gakuto. I'm sorry, Marui-kun, I thought you were Gakuto at first like I told you, and I didn't mean to interrupt your sleep or anything, and I--"

"Can you stay?"

"I can't."

"You did for four hours. Why not now?"

"You just made it all awkward and gross."

" _You_ were the one who waltzed in here and kissed me."

"I'm sorry about that."

"Kiss me again."

"W-What? Sorry, come again?"

"I said, kiss me again."

"But I can't just do that, Gakuto's here too and I'm--we're..."

"Would Mukahi have wanted you to kiss me?"

"...I don't know. He told me to be happy."

"Are you trying victimize Mukahi now? Look, I'm still new to this whole gay thing and I'm not even sure if that's what it should be called, but I kind of want you to kiss me, so can you kiss me?"

"If you want it so bad, why don't _you_ kiss me first?" Jirou says. He smiles a little.

Marui frowns. "You did it at the beginning of the night anyway. Seriously what are you, the Bed Intruder?"

"I never watched the YouTube video."

"You should."

"You're right. I should."

"..."

"..."

"Can you try it again?"

And this is the part where Jirou's arms wrap around him like tv cables, and then comes the part where Akaya busts in after tennis practice and dinner and proudly declares that he'd beaten up fifteen first years in one day and Niou chirps about finally getting to second base with Yagyuu like he hasn't tried to sex up girls before and then they both bet that if Marui practiced his ass off he might still make the regulars again and high school, it's really a bundle of joy, isn't it?

  
  



End file.
